Lahti Sprint Recap

As always, the sprint heat times are thanks to Jan at WorldOfXC.com. I was travelling yesterday, so not only did I not watch these races, I haven’t even really read about them yet either. So this will be an interesting guessing game for me, to see how much I can infer from just the the heat times. First up the men:

That’s a different trend than we typically see for the men, with the heat times becoming gradually faster as the day went on. Emil Jönsson seemed to be skiing fast all day long. Something unusual must have happened to Kriukov and Pettersen Modin (I’ll try to fix the graph later) in the final. Looks like there were 2-3 crashes in the quarters and then some more again in the semis. Seems weird for a classic sprint.

Not much of a difference in the two semifinals:

On to the women:

This pattern of faster times with each round is fairly standard for the women. It looks like there was just one potential crash-like incident in the semis. Bjørgen skied the fastest heat of the day in the final, so how’s that for fitness? Unlike the men, there seemed to be a bit of a split between the women’s semis yesterday:

Not only were Semifinal 1 skiers faster in the semis, but they were faster in the quarters, too. Not sure what to make of that, except that random stuff does happen from time to time.

Comments

It wasn’t Pettersen in the final, it was Jesper Modin who made his usual sixth place appearance.

The Lahti sprint course ends with a very sharp decending U-turn coming into the stadium. Combine this with a sharp left turn in the climb out of the stadium and really narrow tracks and you end up with a course that is not very well suited for sprint races (not very well suited for mass-start either, and there were a lot of small incidents in the men’s race on Saturday as well).